grades are best positions to expose students to various elements of our vision. they are organized to maintain the status quo. if we truly offer a transformative education, we must embark on a process that will breathe life into vision 2025 at the site level. the middle grades, one of the things we want you to know is that all comprehensive middle schools are engaged in the redesign work. we're seeing difference in middle schools. the main anything i want you to know, deeper learning how we really have students engage with the content is at the core. grounded in all of why we

started the mill grade to redesign is that equity continues to be at the centre of the redesign. this means both for access, for culturally design and outcomes. it's been a long journey. middle grades redesign began in 2015 in response to calls from the board of education to resolve the number of issues. from thinking about students in english language learners who didn't get access to electives. we couldn't fit it in the regular day. it resulted in inequitable access at various school sites. if you take a look at this

change. on your left, you see the redesign structures which is the master schedule and the bell schedule. what we really support and what we really want to get to is the deeper learning experience. the redesign school, in order for us to achieve the graduate profile competencies, the model has to change. it includes both thinking of about the way we organize the school day for kids i in the tye of experiences they are having in classes. these are two things, they can't be isolation of the other. we have to release -- they have to happen simultaneously. all of our comprehensive middle schools are engaged in the redesign work. we wanted to share part of that journey where some of our

schools are. we talk about our first wave of schools that focus in on some of the design principles, primarily around tech integration and technology learning as our digital promise partnership. they're in the third year of that effort. in the second wave, we had our partnership with new tech network and three more comprehensive middle schools focus in on learning. in this next wave is thinking about the whole model of redesign so both the deeper learning opportunities as well as the structural components. the scheduling, early release and exploring the aspects of deeper learning process. these aren't the only schools we share.

we wanted to highlight the great work that's happening as schools are taking on components of it whether that's cross disciplinary learning, block scheduling, social and emotional focus, so you can get a sense how the schools are engaged in this work. with that, i want to highlight one of the examples around technology integration. we have seven of our comprehensive middle schools are one to one learning schools. each and every student has access to a device. it's more than access, it's what students are doing with the technology and the rich learning opportunity. we want to share quick video of one of our schools, hoover, in some of the work that's happening at the school. [video]

again, that was hoover middle school and analysis produced by students with their teacher. they have their own green room in their studio. >> i only get to read the

following panel. there's no video. i'm brent stevens. on the right hand side of the screen, we've been working it school communities we've been mobilizing the resources at central offices to begin to plan curriculum and professional development that will be built into the acceleration for all middle school redesign schedule. one of the areas has been around reading acceleration and other is math. we have promising preliminary results from 12 classrooms that are now doing reading acceleration. you can see the stats that we got 50 students engaged in the collecting the level of data. 60% of african-american students met their reading inventory scores while 38% have doubled their expected rate of growth as a result of participation in the class. we're feeling that we got lots of data and reason to proceed.

we've also had multiple opportunities to present before the board and public, the exciting and innovative work we're doing in computer science. currently 62% of middle school student have access to our computer science curriculum. that curriculum is built out in grades, six, seven and eight. what we're seeing is that we are achieving equitable proportional representation in classes. as we do measures through an independent third party research, we're not seeing significant differences on the bases of gender and race. project-based learning. this is another one of the hallmark features of our middle school redesign deeper learning

component. we pulled dozens and dozens of research that we've been looking at. we have one more video and it's equally inspiring that we like to share with you. [video]

>> as we move into that third wave and looking at our schools piloting the full model of redesign, roosevelt and our principal staff is here today, francisco and denman and hoover continue part of a professional learning community learning the redesign from the pilot schools as we look to expand and move forward. in order to talk about the components of the core sequence, through the redesign, all students would have access to the five core areas as well as

the exploratory courses. >> one aspect of the middle grade redesign that we've been exploring is the current model for secondary emerging. it has been difficult. essentially we proposed in the past the students are take twoer their six courses in target language. they are content courses like biology, math or language arts. part of the challenge of that model it's been difficult to maintain staffing in these schools.

what we proposing through middle grade redesign model, we're calling the secondary growth language model that would align our language learning to what's called the act full standard that standard counts for teachers with foreign language. then permit students to have another entry point into world language learning at the sixth grade that's currently prohibited as a result of the schedule. we are excited to be able to try this out next year to realign to new standards. we've been speaking to parent about this. we're receiving positive responses to this as they realize several of the problems with the old model wo would be resolved. >> in terms of stakeholder outreach, we realized that it is super important to community and to engage.

our principal, two are in the room today, we have one from denman middle school and hoover middle high school. there's been 13 school site presentations. five conversation, one educator design group, one family learning session, one public safety website and 200 plus survey entries. we have working groups as well from the graduate profile and actual working group to the different teacher working groups. one of the things engaging with them, we wanted to provide more systematic feedback in our work so that everybody has an idea of what is the feedback what are the things we need and what are the challenges and successes. in terms of our next steps, that is already happening, principal professional development happens. every month, we have creator edr

professional development. we are working with parents for public schools and then in terms of aligning budget and building support, we are proposing a budget to sales force. we're building the -- one of the things that's really important for us to understand, there's also capacity within the district. we are building out the project base learning team and building capacity within. so we don't have to rely on outside consultant to transform the education for our students. thank you. >> president cook: thank you. we do have a few speakers signed up for public comment on this item.

>> hello. welcome commissioner lam. thank you all for the middle school redesign. i'm the chair of the community advisory committee for special education. we were invited to be part of the working groups, talking about this. we appreciate that opportunity to be a stakeholder. this middle school redesign is awesome for so many reasons. for our students disabilities, the equity, the availability, having access to electives, lot of times schools have been set up such that our middle schoolers and high schools they get a study skills across. the equity around this is really something that we appreciate. also for our kids with executive function challenges and sensory processing challenges, the transition times in the middle school and high school hallway between classes are chaos and

disruptive to kids and kid autism can take much longer than four minute of transition to deescalate. not to mention the amount of available time. anyway, having a kid just graduated from denman, thank you team for being here and having middle school at everett, it's been really beneficial for learning environment. so thank you for the thoughtful work. >> i'm fortunate enough to be at

san frisco middle school for the last 10 years. project-based learning is at the heart of best of education. this middle school redesign will allow us to pursue that and to engage. it will allow us to work more closely with our colleagues that are working on studies as well as working with our colleagues in e.l. departments and special ed department. i will give you a quick anecdote. this past winter, students in my class, which is the english class, read novels and then did studies on genocide. , light topic. the kids chose genocide that matched their own ethnic background or or interests. they then researched books and very little teaching from me were going on. they were driven.

one student read five books because nobody taught her about being vietnamese and what it meant. they turned the study into research which was all project-based learning into documentary films. which would blow you away. they are amazing. they learned in very brief period of time how to edit the film and edit sound and they wrote scripts. they did everything you would expect from a great research project. this is doing it with only one period. if we had the block scheduling time, they would have been so much richer and so much better. kids had to come in at lunch before school, after school. my days are very long because it was just one teacher and 160 kids. we made 80 films. imagine what you will be able to do if we're able to do this project-based learning. thank you.

>> president cook: thank you. okay. so, questions or comments from commissioners? commissioner lam. >> commissioner lam: i'm curious to learn more about the acceleration. for example, i see that we've gotten some positive measurements around the literacy acceleration. can you walk me through what that experience would look like? >> one of the first we made with thization courses is to abandon the term intervention. we've been taking lots of care and design environment for the acceleration classes that is warm and inviting and that features lots of cloys.

choice. you'd see bean bags and sofas and you'd see lots of students reconnecting to a love of reading. that is the fundamental job of the acceleration teacher, the rebuild the identity students in the class as readers. >> commissioner sanchez: thank you for the presentation. can you go in-depth about what the master schedule, block scheduling looks like at one of the schools? >> the master schedule, imagine you're a sixth grade student and

your first period class, let's say you might have an acceleration course, you'll be going to reading acceleration course first period, second period, you'll have english. you'll have all the five core areas there. what is different here is when you go into an exploratory course as a sixth grader, one trimester you'll have dance, another one is computer science and then you can have health or world language. it goes into the wheel. that's like consider one period but those different classes change every eight weeks. >> commissioner sanchez: how long are the periods? >> the periods ar periods are 7o 84 minutes. we are engaging with the teacher team to pilot schools to see which clock scheduling meets their needs as a school site.

>> commissioner sanchez: you would have a schedule? >> yes. >> commissioner sanchez: we have data around chronic absenteeism. has this impacted that for the subgroups that are really high in chronic absenteeism. >> most middle school just gone through mid-year data conference. we haven't looked specifically at the the block schedule. that's something we can look into. >> commissioner sanchez: my last question is around the dual merging from middle schools. have you discussed or thought about how that might impact tracking. if you have kids that are in --

[indiscernible] >> commissioner sanchez, we've been aware, it essentially creates students inside the school. one of the goals was to do away with that experience and separation. the advantage here is that world language will take place in the elective and acceleration portions of the day remainder of the courses will all be heth heterogeneous. >> commissioner sanchez: thank you. >> commissioner collins: thank you for making the presentation. i want to say thank you to ms. blanchard who made a presentation. she's my daughter's english teacher. saw them at home freaking out about the research. they made them drive them to school 7:00 in the morning because they had to do their report. i want to say that the engagement that i saw in my own

kids was phenomenal in doing the report that was pretty much independently driven. i saw the results of one of their films. it was amazing. that's the kind of thing i would love it see i in every classroo. so thank you. one of the questions i had, it related to ethnic studies the technology one thing but the actual content is important. i'm wondering where it is culturally teaching and studies fit in in model. >> we've been excited about work taking place at athens. the team assembled all over the content areas to think about infusing the ethnic study framework in all their classes. we hired a t.s.a. who's job is to develop ethnic opportunities at the middle school level.

we're expecting to stand that this year and continue that work. it is our intent to begin to infuse ethnic studies content into multiple classes. all of these content courses have the opportunity to explore and that's our commitment. >> commissioner collins: can it be written down somewhere? i don't see it? i like to see ethnic study and social justice and see culturally relevant teaching. i'm not seeing any of those words that relate to identity, community and those race class culture. >> absolutely. we love to forward on additional information to the board like the ethnic studies. we can modify the way we're presenting. >> commissioner collins: is that linkelinked with this model? >> yes. >> commissioner collins: you said it's been a long journey. you started when my daughters were in sixth grade. they are graduating. when do you think your journey reason done?

>> you're going if hit us with a philosophical question. >> commissioner collins: when will all school have access to all these wonderful things? >> we do know, there will be trying the model out in two schools. it's important we take methodical pace. not all of them is adopted the structural changes. we hope we got the two schools in 2021, we love to move on to three to four more. >> commissioner collins: what year would that be? >> that would be three years forward >> commissioner collins: you mean all students will have access to language, all students would have access to electives? currently we're still not doing

that? >> structural changes will be changes to the bell schedule. there's early release so that professional development is happening for teachers. there will be the exploratory wheel and the acceleration courses. those structural pieces are the ones that we are looking at. one over of the things i want to emphasize is that, the right side, the deeper learning experiences such as project-based learning, such as technology integration as disciplinary learning -- >> ethnic studies? >> i do want to -- we have it featured, i do want to assure you that ethnic studies folks are at the table every team is looking at designing new curriculum with the infusion

framework and meeting regularly with the ethnic study t.s.a. >> commissioner collins: is there a way to get data how many kids can take elective? students don't have access to coding. they don't have access to art classes. i like to know where we're at now? that's a real important issue for me. my kids had a great experience, taking coding and dance and their peers don't have access. i want to see the actual numbers and see when that will be equalized. i guess, finally i want to say as a parent, i like that you using the sterilization i term .

i'm wondering whether that will create confusion for family. finally my question on project-based learning how are you supporting that? how are you providing probably development for teachers? >> with the pilot schools, with the grant from sales force, many of the pilot schools are senting their teachers to the buck institute this summer. we also have a district day on february 8th where teachers are also going to -- the project-based learning district days. we'll be engaging with teachers on their needs in terms of teaching in block scheduling and teaching for p.b.l. >> commissioner collins: i know you're aiming to have teachers to be together at one time with the early release, i heard

feedback from black parents at w. of your presentations, they were concerned about that in certain neighborhoods. there are issues with violence in the community. that's why they had staggered schedules, that's why they felt schedules were beneficial. that's not something i considered. i wonder if you reached out to the apec and address those concerns with that early release at the same time. >> we have been speaking with apec. i don't know that specifically addressed the issue about staggered releases. any family who needs an after school placement if there's an early release we'll get one. that's been part of what we've been contemplating as we move

ahead. >> commissioner collins: thank you. >> president cook: thank you. thank you to all the administrators that came out. you all are awesome. [applause] number two, we have property redesign. >> thank you presenting tonight will be the deputy superintendent strategic partnerships and communications. >> good evening commissioners and superintendent. i'm joined here technology officer. thank you for staying with us. communications and the department of technology are partnering up on this project which is in many ways, con plex

but a lot simpler than redesigning middle school. we have been working very closely with our consultant and we're joined here tonight by a few members of the team. we also have our internal team which consistent of jill shogger. it's been eight years since the last time the district was able to refresh our public facing website. lot has changed in terms of accessibility requirements as well as in the ways that people use websites and based on an old family technology use survey, we found at least 85% many subgroups of families are reported that they go online

from home. especially low income communities mobile phone is the main way they access information and right now our website is not mobile friendly. that is one of the many reasons that we need to do this update. we also have about over 100 school websites, 60 different department websites in addition to our main website. what happened over the years, we've gotten layered and layered. families are looking for content, it can be really difficult to have to navigate to different sites and different environments. some of them also need accessibility requirements some do not. they are all part of sfusd. some of them have translation and some do not. we are working to solve all these issues. just to add in the fact here, we

are under a resolution agreement with the department of education and office of civil rights. we're working to meet that resolution as well. as you'll see on this slide, we have many goals and design principles that we're following as we look to improve our site. specifically, we are focused on tech equity on accessibility on collaboration and community. on being flexible so we can scale and grow as needs change. this site is currently our current site has over 150,000 unique users per month. this an important resource for our families. we started with a phase one where we looked at analytics, we conducted interviews and we talked to parents, teachers, administrators and students.

we looked at the reasons why people were going to the website, what kind of information me most needed what the big challenges were in finding that information and specifically considered the needs of our multilingual families as well as people with accessibility needs. what we heard in general, the content is dense. sometimes it is not intuitive where to find things. when people need to go directly to information, sometimes they would abandon their search, because they couldn't find what they are looking for easily. we heard from our staff, which the site is also meant to serve. they needed more consistency and support to keep that information up to date. if you're a school site, for

example, it's very challenging if you don't have a parent volunteer or a staff member who can keep your website up to date. we also know lot of our staff go to the internet and are looking for things like their paycheck information. we need to make it really easy for them to find that and not many layers down. >> from that phase one and all of the feedback that we have received, we embrevarbrevard ema design approach we wanted to show snapshot what the beta site looks like. you can see what the new website would look like from a device and mobile device. we're middling emotional responsive version of the website. as we mentioned previously, families are accessing our online properties through their

mobile devices. we want make sure to we're building for that mobile view. addressing some of the challenges or issues we had with dense content. very crisp and clear and concise with the language. we call mega menu. it gives you the submenu and short descriptions of of what those are to help you navigate and help you go through that process. we're also organizing and curating content based on who you are. if you're a family member at sfusd, what's the information for families? what's the relevant information for our students. organizing the information little bit differently. we talked about flexibility being key, we're building this on a flexible open source platform. there's a rich user community.

as we grow and evolve, we have support in place. here's an example of if i were to click on the information for families where i see all of the resources whether i'm looking for my lunch menus or information about events that are happening that are geared towards families. i would find that in this section of the site. we're excited to have a new way to learn about schools and to search for schools. through our school search page. this enable families to look for middle school or high school. they can drill down to the specific set of schools they're interested in learning more about. again, very responsive to the user and what they are looking for to help them drive them to the appropriate content.

each school will have what we're calling a front door. really that entry point. the goal of this platform, there's that single point of entry to get to content. equity is a focus of ours. we know that we have disparities across schools in ems of their web presence. how are we building platforms for all our schools. it doesn't allow for custom makings. customization. as we talked about as well, for the employees, having this front door open. when i log in with my sfusd i.d. and pass word, i see my name pop up and lincol links to my pay s.

it's all right doctor for me -- there for me as well. [indiscernible] >> developing new content as we launch, the main reason for the site is critical. we wanted to share for you a little overview of how this works because our district doesn't have the staffing -- everyone make a request and we post all the information. we have content managers who are identified by each school and each department. then we have those people who are the content managers, are supported by the content administrator who are able to help them troubleshoot if they have tech cam problems.

there's people who are also content author. that's an example of a slow and similarly in a inspect level you may have a math specialist to give the content to the person that's in curriculum solution has the training to update the content and get the support from the content administrator. it's still going to be similar so what it is now. there are hundreds of people who cacontribute content to the sit. we are, though, which is exciting, going to increase the amount -- we are launching this

in beta. beta means we're still going to be working on it and improving it as it launch. you heard today, i think google was in may beta for many years. we anticipate we'll be in beta for a few months where we'll be able to get feedback. our -- it will be linked from our main site so people can start using it and giving us feedback. we have 40 school schools that prioritizing to move before end of june. as we are -- it's a cost of saving measure.

those schools are supported on a different platform. that is the time line and we are excited to get your feedback once we launch beta. i'll be happy it take your questions. so excited to hear about the upgrade, redesign. couple of questions, one was mentioned about the identification scalable and accessible, cms. trying to understand little bit more about the goals of that cma and how that -- second is around how will we be integrating, how

we're utilizing parent and student view currently? like the classroom will that part of the master page for students. lastly, remain time feedback between content managers the administrators and authors. that will be part of the bay it. one thing i think about is principals, for example, principals are responsible for thousands of things and hundreds of things. we've seen parents being able to help to fulfill this role. that's great to hear that. that's an opportunity for the parents.

>> it touch upon your first two questions, c.m.s. is an open source platform. the work that we've been doing with our partner on this is part of that design process building out from all of the requirements and feedback so that that beta platform is robust and handle the various templates. we can have the consistency and coherent across the school front doors for example be the tent p. we'll have a process where we'll take in the additional request that we have to build that

functionality over time. in terms of integration, from the family page from that student page, very clear access into our family portal and student portal, these are all password protected. ensuring the privacy of students and families. this is about public facing. once you log in, you get the information that's specific to you. we understand the need for a quicker feedback loop. i take that to heart. we do have one person that is able to respond to requests are the related to the website when it comes to content. we haven't had a consistent person to do the staffing

shortages. we looked at how can we make sure we're setting ourselves up for better success this time? we are adding another content special who's job is to focus on supporting schools nap will address the need for quicker feedback loop. we have we have which schools many different content management schools that school are using. we know that it's going to take a while to get everybody under the same platform. >> thanks for the presentation. as an completion -- seeing this

and through the school search pages, can this be a part where schools can add information about the innovative steps they have and the research that they have so that families have access to it? >> absolutely. we're looking for ways to help get the news out to families about cool things that are happening at schools. what we hope we can do by that content management suspect -- they have access to do that now but i think it's a time and resource issue that's been stopping them to do that. we have someone supports

underenrolled students. are those all going to be people with the background in this? >> actually, we still only have two staff rules that are supporting with content. we'll have hundreds of people whop have access to training to add content. because we can't have two people supporting that content. >> we're taking some the burden of the development off loading that from school school partner. it'in term of we're building out

the templates for them, the forms, the structures that they can plug in the content. should also share that nah in addition to the school front door, schools talked about the schools prioritytizing to move their current remember -- the ft entry point and they're able to build out sites with multiple pages that's specific to their schools. it has the same common looking field. we're able to have the sfusd identity. >> commissioner collins: you really appreciate that both as a parent who searched through the

website. i've updated the website as an employee. i know how long -- one of the questions i'm having relates to enrollment. my daughter wants to take french, we trying to find out which one do french. we got only the website and we couldn't find it. i'm excited about the facting that -- looking at the -- i'm wondering how are you determining what buckets of content going to be on every school page? i would say tell everybody what lappings tau-- how are you makis

around what the buckets are. you got parents shopping for schools they're looking for tours and what the school have. you have parents and families currently there. they are looking for what's the calendar for the school and when is the next bake sale or whatever and how are you determining how to use the real estate so people know where to go with these two user groups. >> there's a few things that we are attempting to do. i think it will be a work in progress. one is we've had user stories. we certificat -- how would theyr way through and what kind of buckets would they use. we've also done focus groups and user studies with different potential website user to look at how they navigate and how they find or don't find in

they're looking in the prototypes. we're relying a lot on our partner who have developed sites before to have them come with your outside lens and suggest the way content will be organized. we have lot of different users to your example, someone who's looking for elementary schools might be looking for different types of content. >> i would add, we shared a screen shot of the school search page. we're starting with a base of filters draw the focus groups and through our user personas we're identified high youth

after school. it can filter your list based on whan you are selecting. there are probably more we're not starting with. as we get feedback, on what else should be part that filtering process, we can include as well. [please stand by]

. >> hi. i have two questions. so my first one would be, would this new platform allow students to communicate to their teachers or principals if there were -- if they were experiencing any problems? and my second would be as the system is almost ready for launch, can students

participate in focus group feedback so that the system can be tweaked to be more student friendly? >> thank you for your questions. so in terms of using this platform for communications, this would not have a two-way communication system, but there are other ways we can do that, through our student portal or google suite that we use for e-mail. some of your classes may have google classroom that you're using, so those are the ways in which students and teachers can interact and communicate with each other. this is sort of that entry point, but through here, you can get access to all of these tools once you're logged in, so we're building integrations that way, but there's still some separate tools and systems that we use. and then, in terms of students and focus groups, we'd love to get student focus groups and your feedback when we launch or

beta, so we can -- our beta, so we can work with p.c. to make that happen. thank you. >> president cook: you just touched on communication which i wanted to come back to, with the website, there's a chat feature that comes up, how can i help you? how can i answer your question? when i'm looking at the website, if i just click on any of the links between community or parent students -- there's, no matter where you go, you can't find a number. so i was -- we're a people organization, we support people. people want to talk to people. so before i continue, can you address both those matters, how

to make numbers more accessible, how to answer questions more quickly? >> so thank you for the idea and the feedback in terms of could there be a chat feature? we don't have that as part of our beta, but we'll take that back to the group and see what's possible and how we would set that up and manage and maintain that. but to your point, too, around phone numbers, you know, that is -- and the templates that we're building out how we're making the contact information very clearly accessible, so that it's on the same page or on the school site and department page, so be very explicit about how you find out more information or do connect with somebody. i do want to understand that i -- add that i understand, for example, how to add 311. we talked to 311, what kind of questions do you get about the district, and we can send to

311 for that one-stop kind of call center, because right now, you'd have to know which department to go to and then to call that department, so you have to find that department's number. i know for some people, they have many -- they get passed around. so we're two-fold working on this one is to try to see where there might be opportunities to leverage 311 for the district, and the other piece of it is to look at how can -- you know, obviously, how can people find what they're looking for on the website with better search functionality and things like that. and in general, the question you raised if you're a community member and you call the wrong office, for example, that the person still sees you as somebody you're there to serve. and how can we do things in the customer service world that we call a warm transfer, instead of saying you've got the wrong department, call this

department. you say, let me get your number. i'll have them give you a call, and if you don't hear from someone, give them a call back. >> president cook: so then how feasible is it to have, like, a chat feature. >> we have to talk to the designers about -- >> president cook: yeah, but maybe you can tell me, is it 5%? >> i will just share that we will bring that back. one is the technology aspect of it, and then, ensuring that we have the people who are able to be responsive and answer those questions, so there's building out that infrastructure i think that's what we'd have to look into and come back with. >> president cook: yeah. so i'm glad we're doing customer service studies. in terms of -- i know people have been looking at this

website in a lot of different ways. when we look at the current, like, most highly used pages, and if we have some sort of, like, gauge of, do we have sort of gauge of what those pages are before experiencing those pages, and they're on a trail to find something, and they stop, can you speak to that at all? >> so we do ongoing analytics through google, and also, we've had a few different type of analytics tools that give us heat maps, as well, so we can see which pages people go to, what pages they stay on the most, so we will continue to monitor that. and can he definitely provide more support and attention to the things that are more frequently looked and requested, and we're hoping if we have the new design, we'll see some positive changes in some areas.